The End of Fair Use on YouTube?

I’m traveling out of town this weekend, so we’re doing this week’s look at the Reel Web a bit differently: we’re doing it vlog style! I quickly look at a couple stories that stand out to me and share them with you guys in a slightly different format than normal. What do you think of it? Let me know in the comments below!

Is Bill S.978 The End Of Fair Use On YouTube?

Our main story covers the potential end of Fair Use on YouTube. Bill S.978 will make it a felony to stream any kind of copyrighted material, especially music or audio. That means you could go to jail even if you post a little video of you in a restaurant while there’s a copyrighted song playing in the background.

Hey guys, my name is Tim Schmoyer and welcome to another look at the Reel Web where every week we just kind of take some of the highlights of the online video world from last week and summarize them here for you. This week’s a little different, I am actually traveling, I am at a hotel room in New York for a couple of days but I didn’t want to leave you guys hanging, I still wanted to give you guys some updates on some of the stuff that stood out to me mostly.

And we’re going to start with the post from Nalts, willvideoforfood.com and he basically says that nothing happened in the online video world today and he says Tim Schmoyer can testify, he’s had to resort to a story of online cloud video editing. And yes, fortunately I get to pick the story that I want to do, that are most important to me.

One of the stories that happened this past week was big that’s not really that important to me is the Netflix showdown, they lost 800 million, or 800 thousand subscribers due to all their price increases and stuff and their stock dropped like crazy, 40% in one day. I don’t really care about that story so we’re not going to say much about that.

But if you are a Steve Jobs fan and most of us in video probably are, 60 minutes did a review of the book that came out, his biography, it’s really good, I’ll put a link in the description below of course if you want to go watch it in two parts. I watched the whole thing and was definitely intrigued by it, learned a lot.

Also, we’ll go back to willvideoforfood.com and this post is really intriguing. It’s a post that Kevin published but he copy and pasted a comment from one of his other blogs about the YouTube algorithm thing getting all like, changed and messed up. And the post is by an anonymous person but they kind of included like, too many details to make it seem like it’s really, it sounds like it’s someone who knows what they’re talking about maybe on the inside of YouTube about the algorithm change that like, has impacted so many amateurs because their traffic has dropped in like, half and now they’re only getting like, half the money.

And we covered that in another episode of the Reel Web but it’s definitely worth checking out if you want to kind of see some, maybe one person’s anonymous perspective of how things are working behind YouTube. And that seems kind of legit, a little too specific to be just kind of made up. So check that out, the link is below.

And also, this one’s very important and there is right now a bill in front of congress called S978 and that will make pretty much any sort of copyrighted streaming stuff completely illegal. I saw it first from Phillip DiFranco and he’ll explain it to you a bit better here.

“The new bill S978 will make it a felony to use any copyrighted materials in a video online. So if you’re recording yourself and you’re listening to Justin Bieber and maybe you’re just doing something, you’re singing along with it and you upload that video to the internet, that would be considered a felony and you could face up to five years in prison. And would be insane. And so interestingly enough, some guys from Fight For the Future realize that Justin Bieber would have been put in jail at the beginning of his career if this law was already in place. And as much as I can joke on Bieber, that is insane and for many people, they say oh they’re not going to do that to kids. And to that I would say, are you kidding me? Do you remember when Napster went down and all the music companies started suing kids just cause they could? If something like this were to go through, this is the beginning of the end. Fair use, a thing of the past and free speech is not far behind.”

So now even like audio that’s streaming in the background in a restaurant while you’re taking a video of you and your friends or whatever, not even that, if you put it online, it’s considered illegal and you could serve up to five years in prison for that. So if you guys want to take action against this, the link for that is below, you can go to freebieber.org, I think it’s called, and you can check it out and sign the petition and also help spread the word about this so that it does not get passed.

So check it out and I will see you guys for a creator’s tip on Wednesday that will be featured actually by someone else. So it will be cool to hear from some of you guys, your tips and I’ll be featuring those for you guys on Wednesday. So subscribe if you haven’t already and give this video a thumbs up and I will see you guys in a couple of days. Bye.

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